In part 3, just in time for this weekend’s “Prisoner of Sinestro” episode, of Newsarama’s interview with Green Lantern: The Animated Series producer Giancarlo Volpe, he discusses how fans react to changes from the comics, the decision to put Aya and Razer together, how he staffed the show, the introduction of Sinestro and what’s still coming this season. Check out some choice quotes below.

 

On Sinestro:

I never wanted Sinestro to walk in the room and have everyone go “Ooo the dreaded Sinestro!” They wouldn’t know, if he hasn’t become a bad guy yet! So we do this thing in our show where Hal really loves Sinestro. He’s just like, “that dude rocks!” [As you can see in our exclusive clip directly above this answer! – Lucas] He really admires him! So, the hardcore fans who’ve been reading this stuff will get the trouble, the potential danger of Hal Jordan idolizing Sinestro. But the young fans will hopefully think “well if Hal Jordan likes Sinestro, then I do too!” And potentially, if one day things go awry with Sinestro, the new fans will go “I didn’t see that coming!” and the hardcore fans will go “Yup, knew that was going to happen!”

 

 

On choosing Red Lanterns as first villains:

 

I think again when Sinestro was off-limits, the Red Lanterns became the obvious choice. Indigo – especially at the time in the comics – the Indigo Tribe was much more mysterious, so we didn’t really know how to play them. And Larfleeze, the Orange Lantern, is just a one man band.

 

So Red Lanterns seemed like the obvious choice once we knew it wouldn’t be Sinestro.

We did have to make the conscious choice early on to make them a bit more calm, and able to hold conversation, than they are in the comics. I remember there was a lot of back-and-forth on Razer. We knew we wanted Razer to join the team, and we talked about how that would work: would he be a raving lunatic for a few episodes and they’d have to calm him down, and the more we talked about it, it was just a lot of steps to cover. So it was simpler to make them just a little more calm and collected, and focus on them being vengeance driven.

I know that a lot of fans had a lot of problems with how the Red Lanterns differ from those in the comics during those first few episode, but it seems like that’s gone away! (laughs)

 

On Aya & Razer’s Love Origin:

 

Well originally when I was being hired for the job, there was this promo poster that Bruce Timm had drawn. Razer looked a lot older, and Aya was just referred to as “the robot,” and they, at my job interview, mentioned “maybe Razer will have a thing for the Robot.”

 

(laughs) And I loved that! You know I mentioned before that I like having romance in there. I had mentioned that one of my favorite couples at Marvel was Scarlet Witch and the Vision, and it was okay that a human fell in love with a robot, it wasn’t really questioned that much. So we thought that wasn’t a bad avenue to explore.

It was Jim’s idea that she be the navcom for the ship. So then we thought we’d really take our time with it, and she didn’t even need a body at first. So we didn’t introduce her body until the fourth episode. I remember too she didn’t even leave the ship until episode five when she sneaks out. And you don’t see her fight until episode 9, I think. So it was really fun to step out her progress.

 

On staffing GLTAS:

 

When we started staffing, I had my wish list, but unfortunately, everyone is usually working on something already. Like I would have loved to have Joaquin Dos Santos work on it, but he was already working on Korra and I couldn’t even ask him to do it.

I remember when we first started staffing, I was a little worried about “how are we gonna do this?” But fortunately, how things are run here at Warner Brothers by our VP Bobbie Page, she’s really good at putting talent where it’s needed. She looks at every artist as part of this big talent pool, and whenever a new show starts, she’ll throw the right bodies at it to get it going.

 

But it’s been great. I really think that some of the best storyboard artists in the business are at this studio. When you do nothing but action for years, you get really good. I was really fortunate to get guys like Sam Liu, Rick Morales, etcetera etcetera!

 

On recording with the cast:

I’m in every record session, every ADR session. I’ve come to become friends with those guys. It’s a blast! They obviously bring yet another facet to the characters that’s very important.

It’s hard to imagine this now, but back in the days before we had voice cast the characters, it was a little harder to figure out how the characters would say things or how they would react to given situations. But once you get the character designed and you can hear their voices, it becomes so much clearer what they would do.

We kind of wanted a “Ben Grimm” effect for Kilowog, and Kevin Michael Richardson did that so well. We just fell in love with that character instantly. That’s one example of many!

 

They’re just so good. A lot of the casting on the show were names that Bruce Timm brought up because of his experience. He’s done a lot more voice directing than I have. So he’d just say “oh, bring this guy in and he’ll knock it out of the park.” It was just really cool to see how competent, capable, and versatile those people are. I really think we got some of the best in the business on this show, and I see why their résumés are so long and why they get hired for everything: they’re just that good!

 

we record everything as an ensemble when possible. There are a couple of exceptions where scheduling-wise something doesn’t work out and we have to bring them in separately.

To me it’s always better to record together. If you hear one guy, if they can react to the other one – I think one of the acting mottos is that acting is reacting – it’s hard to react if you don’t hear the other person, how they’re delivering the line.

 

On the rest of the season(SPOILERS):

Larfleeze has been confirmed. We’ll see the return of a lot of characters. Carol will be back… as a Star Sapphire!

Anti-Monitor is running amok. There’s been a lot of talk, I’ve seen people say “are we trying to do Crisis on Infinite Earths” but no, we’re not trying to do that. That would probably be too huge for our budget to be honest, even if we wanted to do that. But the fact that Anti-Monitor has the ability to wipe out entire universes; we tried to make that apparent in the “Steam Lantern” episode. Our universe is very much in danger right now because of that, so don’t take anything lightly, there’s a lot at stake this season.

 

Hmm… Zilius Zox in his underwear. (laughs). I’ll just leave it at that!